mb712

I bet Jenna Marbles would be able to make an awesome video about this topic. (Speaking of people with psych graduate degrees that ended up being relatively useless...)

I've been eyeing a couple countries who tend to only let Americans move there if they have Ph.D.s (or some sort of highly specialized uncommon skill). Good thing to bring up.

I don't think that person's post was making accusations about you, just a reflection of some application acceptance rate woes. Out of those 500+ Oregon applicants, you KNOW some of them were "hey I wanna be a doctor and a diploma from this school would look nice on my office wall...." people, even though you weren't.

I'm not either. I already have it in my mind that it may be a concern once I'm finished with school but who knows what will happen between now and then. I'm probably at an advantage with political psychology though since it can easily work outside of social psychology so maybe I should just shut up.

Now to find out how to beat the system and upvote this post more than once...

....oh my god....

I've really had to be open to new ideas because of this whole process. The more I look at data on how few people get into grad school, finish grad school, and then land a decent gig, the more discouraged I get. But, my heart isn't set on an academic gig. I just want to do research, and I don't really care how/where I do it as long as I'm doing it. I'm sorry about Oregon, those are ridiculous acceptance rates. You beat the odds though, you got accepted somewhere. Let the shock of the Oregon numbers wear off a little before you decide to give up the whole idea of graduate school.

I applied to a program at my current institution. A lot of people in the department know who I am but I didn't work closely with them, I did research elsewhere on campus. I've been accepted, so the stigma can't be too bad! I've been told applying to your home institution is frowned upon more in clinical, but I also know of a clinical student at my current institution who did undergrad here. Case by case POI preferences probably reign supreme over any sort of university preference for these kind of situations. As much as we may not like it, connections are important now. I'm not sure knowing a POI personally would help anymore than something like a LOR writer having gone to grad school with your POI, but connections matter/help nonetheless. We all need to put our networking pants on, haha.

500+ just for social?!

I'm not in clinical but fwiw, I worked in two labs simultaneously for most of my undergraduate career. They were kind of related, so it was great experience to be able to see how different labs approached the same kind of ideas, and what resources I could use to look at the topic at hand. It was also really beneficial to see how even the unrelated aspects from each lab kind of overlapped with what I was doing at the other, so I learned how seemingly unrelated topics tied together. Other than the learning experiences, the connections which turned into LORs were obviously very helpful. The more people you have to choose from, the better. (Also, I can't think of a single person at my current institution applying to clinical programs that isn't in more than one lab. Being at multiple labs is the norm here.)

Home institution

Working memory

black magic

Logged into the website to check an application status. There was an alert on the front page, "If you would like to accept your offer of admission..." Turns out it was just a message about a third party financial site being down so any admitted students in any department who want to accept their financial support offer need to wait until the site is back up. My application is still under review. Sigh.

In the intro class I took, only 30% of the grade was exams. The rest were analyses and write ups, SPSS usage tests, that kind of stuff. We also had a semester long project, similar to what you mentioned above, which we turned into a poster to present and mock journal submission. I LOVED the class.

I'm sorry. This created a moment of panic for me. I haven't heard from them so I checked my status and it still says "The admissions committee is reviewing your file." Womp @ uncertainty.

If schools are basically sending you an email that says "Hey! We think you're awesome & will contribute enough that we're willing to throw money at resources at you for several years!" it's probably a good idea to show gratitude.

I haven't heard a peep from any schools that had a December 1st deadline. On the other hand, I've already been accepted by schools with January 15th and February 1st deadlines.

It's an easy way to weed out people? I hate standardized tests for an amount of reasons I can't even count, but it is an indication of how you've faired in a system designed to churn out test results. For the most part people teach and learn for the purpose of passing tests, right? So if you've been groomed in an American educational system well ("well" according to American educational standards), you'll perform as such on standardized tests. I've had more than one somewhat young faculty member tell me they don't think they would perform well enough on the GRE to be accepted into a graduate school these days. It's basically a contest of who has the best resources growing up - who was taught how to take tests and who currently has the money/time to do test prep. Because of things like this, and how much data is showing the GRE is a poor predictor of graduate school success, I really don't think the GRE will continue to be a measure so highly emphasized. (I hope this isn't just wishful thinking.)

(Assuming female) I would suggest a skirt suit so then you can wear sweater tights and nice flats. Otherwise you'll get snow all over your pants if you go the pant suit route. If there is a ton of snow that would get into your flats, go for some nice boots instead.

Plenty of jobs pay for moving expenses, I'm not sure why asking if grad schools do this makes anyone entitled, helpless or a brat. It seems like a perfectly valid question that I'm sure a lot of people have.

Congrats!

While doing some lurking on here/other forums about funding, it also seems like programs are more willing to offer better stipends if you're also considering other places. I'm not sure a POI would be assigned the messenger duty on that though unless they happen to also be the grad program coordinator. Another possible reasoning for inquiring about your other offers/prospects.

Yep, that's what I was trying to get at.